cial seduction. The South Sea project
expanded and inflated as the {188} Mississippi Scheme had done. Its
temporary success turned the heads of the whole population.

[Sidenote: 1720--The bank competes]

Hundreds of schemes, still more wild, sprang into sudden existence. Some
of the projects then put forward, and believed in, surpass in senseless
extravagance anything satirized by Ben Jonson. So wild was the passion
for new enterprises, that it seemed as if, at one time, anybody had only
to announce any scheme, however preposterous, in order to find people
competing for shares in it. The only condition of things in our own time
that could be compared with this epoch of insane speculation is the
railway mania of 1846, when, for a brief season, George Hudson was king,
and set up his hat in the market-place, and all England bowed down in
homage to it. But the epidemic of speculation in the reign of the
railway king was comparatively harmless and reasonable when compared with
the midsummer madness of the South Sea scheme.

The South Sea scheme was brought before the notice of the House of
Commons in 1720. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was Mr. Aislabie. We
have already seen Mr. Aislabie as one of the secret committee who
recommended the impeachment of Oxford and Bolingbroke. How well he was
fitted for his office will appear from the fact that he was altogether
taken in by the project, and by the financial arguments of those who
brought it forward. Sunderland and Stanhope were taken in likewise--but
there was nothing very surprising in that. A statesman of those days did
not profess to understand anything about finance or economics, unless
these subjects happened to belong to his department; and the statesman
was exceptional who could honestly profess to understand them even when
they did. Walpole, however, was a minister of a different order. He was
the first of the line of statesmen-financiers. He saw through the
bubble, and endeavored to make others see as clearly as he did himself.
Walpole assailed the project in a pamphlet, and opposed it strenuously in
his place in Parliament. He was {189} not at that time a minister of the
Crown; perhaps, if he had been, the South Sea Bill might never have been
presented to Parliament; but the nation and the Parliament were off their
heads just then. The caricaturists and the authors of lampoon verses
positively found out the South Sea scheme before the financiers an